3 Steps to Turn Your WordPress Site Into a Lead Generating Machine

Last week Brian and I both gave lightning talks at the Sacramento WordPress Meetup. Brian’s talk shared the 5 must have plugins we recommend for every WordPress website.

My talk covered how to turn your website visitors into clients and customers — more specifically I talked about website strategy and three steps you can take to turn your website into a lead generating machine.

How to Make Your Website a Lead Generating Machine:

Creating a complete small business website takes comprehensive strategic planning of the content and user flow, the user experience, the sales funnel, the design, the navigation menus, the page templates, and more. Usually my website strategy presentation is an hour long, but for the Sacramento WordPress meetup, I was limited to only 10 minutes!

These are the three website strategies I shared in my talk — the strategies I think are most important for a website owner to understand:

• STRATEGY 1: Use the Know, Like, Trust, Conversion approach to naturally lead your visitors to take action
• STRATEGY 2: Create multiple opportunities for visitors to find your key money content
• STRATEGY 3: Eliminate all unnecessary distractions from your sales funnel and conversion pages

Now, let’s dive deeper into each of these three strategies:

WEBSITE STRATEGY 1:
Know, Like, Trust, Conversion

The four steps of the Know, Like, Trust, Conversion approach is critical to the long term success of a lead generation website.

Today, the web is littered with mediocre free offers and email opt-in boxes making promises that don’t deliver, and inboxes are filled with spam from companies they did not give permission to. As a result, consumers are more picky about who they give their email address to. That means they need to know who you are and know that you can help them; like what you have to say and your expert point of view, and trust that you really do know what you’re doing BEFORE they take any type of action on your website.

When you implement the Know, Like, Trust, Conversion approach on your website, you’ll notice:

• Your ideal clients will self-select themselves right into your best-fit services, products, and programs
• Sales with be made with more ease, and your sales cycle ill be shortened
• New business leads and referrals will increase

WEBSITE STRATEGY 2:
Multiple Ways to Reach “Money” Content

Most website owners — and even a lot of web designers — list all of the website pages in the main site navigation menu and stop there. In fact, on a regular basis, I hear comments like:

“I have it in my navigation, do I really need to link to it anywhere else?”

“Do I need to link to that page again, it’s already in my slider?”

“Isn’t linking to the same page in all of these places repetitive?”

The answer to all questions is a resounding YES! Only giving visitors one way to browse your content and reach your important web pages is a recipe for failure.

• Different people will connect with different types of and areas of content on your site. Some people will simply click through your navigation menu from left to right, some will scan/read the page first and click a link that sounds interesting, so may look at what’s in the sidebar or footer and find a link they like there.
• You must provide multiple opportunities for your website visitors to find your key “money” content — the pages and content that are part of your sales funnel — as quickly and as easily as possible. That means helping them get there from different places on your website so they stay on your site for as long as possible.
• For example, on our home page, we link to the most important pages in our sales funnel FOUR different times — in the navigation menu, in the slider, in the widgets below, and in the footer.

WEBSITE STRATEGY 3:
Eliminate Unnecessary Distractions

We love WordPress because it puts website owners in total control of their website. We also at times get really frustrated because WordPress puts website owners in total control of their website.

What do I mean? Let me explain. WordPress gives website owners the ability to add pretty much anything they want to their websites at any time — and most add content, badges, plugins, widgets, feeds, ads, logos, and other junk, crap, and clutter to their site because they can.

But just because you can, that doesn’t mean you should.

Most WordPress website owners don’t have a clear website strategy in place, so they just add stuff willy-nilly to their site because a friend added it to their site, or because they think it’s cool … not because it’s going to help them convert website visitors into clients and customers.

But what they don’t realize is that all that clutter they are cramming into their website sidebars and footers is actually hurting their website conversions and sending visitors away from their sites!

So before you add anything to your website — whether it’s in the content area, sidebars, or footer — ask yourself these questions:

• Will this add value to my website?
• Will this enhance my visitors’ experience on my site?
• Will this move visitors closer to taking action?

And, if you already have a site full of clutter and a crazy long sidebar full of random stuff, review each element you’ve added, ask yourself these questions, and get rid of any that have a NO answer.

And That’s It!

That’s my recap of my lighting talk for the Sacramento WordPress meetup on how to convert website visitors into clients and customers and three steps you can take to turn your website into a lead generating machine.

If you’re a designer, developer, or WordPress user in the greater Sacramento region, come on out and say hi at one of the next Sacramento WordPress meetups — we’d love to meet you! The Sacramento WordPress meetup group meets on the third Tuesday of each month at Hacker Lab — 1715 I Street, Sacramento.